Thank you. I wasn’t referring to your comments as anecdotes, but the ‘I did test prep and got a high score, so obviously test prep is the only thing that matters’ type of stories.
I don’t need to compare the US to other countries to do that. % families below the poverty line is a decent number, developed by people who study the issue and know better than you or i.
I was just pointing out why it’s dumb to dispute that number based on average dollars earned in other countries.
This is true.
And it has nothing to do with whether some children in the USA have to work to supplement the family’s income.
Not to mention that the only way you could stay alive in the USA on $1.90 a day would be to be successfully homesteading fertile land which you already owned and on which for some reason you paid no property tax (though I think in some states your 1.90 a day might cover that if you didn’t buy anything else); and in addition to be lucky enough that nobody in your family needed any healthcare.
– that’s $57 a month. You can’t get a one bedroom apartment around here these days for ten times that; and I’m in one of the cheaper real estate areas in the country. And that would be with nothing to eat, not even used clothes to wear, and not an aspirin for your headache.
Yes, I’m aware that there are people in the world with nothing to eat or wear that they couldn’t scavenge out of a dump, and even more reasons for their heads to ache. And that still has nothing to do with the question of whether some children in the USA have less time to read than others because they have to work.
I don’t remember whether they told us our scores; and, if they did, I wasn’t writing it down and making sure to store the information where I’d be able to get at it fifty or more years later.
Depends. Are you going to keep giving your opinion in @IvoryTowerDenizen’s field? (Which, I note, also takes some time. More time, of course, if one first researches whether one can back it before posting.)
OK, that number is projected to be 13.7% of Americans are projected to be under the poverty line in 2021 by people who know better than you or I Is that a “decent” number?
From these people
On that website, supposedly by people who know more than you or I, under the statistic of the projected poverty levels, it says this.
then this
So 13.7% of the US population lives below the poverty line. Is that a shitload? Not if you compare it to India, which they have done. It doesn’t make it acceptable. It just gives you the scope of the problem. It would be good if that number were zero. As an aside, that’s why I supported universal basic income which would decrease the level of the poor while redistributing from the rich.
Sam_Stone didn’t solely do that. He also pointed out the level of poverty for the US and compared it to the average level of poverty in the world.
If you’re going to point out what’s dumb, it would help to point out what you think is the smart or acceptable answer.
One reason I don’t like echo chambers, which is what this thread is advocating, is because the level of debate becomes very lazy. People use the argument that everyone agrees with me as a valid argument instead of using real sources and information.
I’ve done a lot of this research about poverty levels and economic statistics before, probably in a debate against Sam_Stone. Without people who question, “debate” becomes just reinforcing what everyone already believes.
More like you’d be living on the streets and begging from passersby. I heard there are tent cities in Los Angeles.
The latter is what I am proposing to do. At this point I am unable to take it on faith, and I think discussing one’s ideas with others provides a valuable reality check.
Perhaps you think I was rude, or too dismissive or something… if so, I don’t know how to fix that.
Yes, it is. And it’s hardly shocking to learn that there are other countries that have even more people in poverty.
Remember, this was a discussion about whether the SATs, as used in the US, tend to help those who are already ahead. And it was mentioned that many kids work in the afternoon while their more ament peers might be reading for pleasure. And someone from the UK said, “what, high school kids in the US have to work? Isn’t that a wealthy country?!”
The answer, of course, is that yes, lots of kids in the US have to work. Heck, we even have a shit ton of kids living in poverty". Obviously, more kids work than just those in poverty, but indeed, we have a shit ton of kids who are actually living in poverty.
How many kids in India are in poverty is really not relevant to a discussion of SATs in the US. And dragging it in to suggest that impoverished kids in the US are really doing fine, which is what Sam Stone did, is a dumb digression.
Okay, thanks to you I’ve learned the proper term for what I wanted to talk about: ‘differential prediction’ - whether the scores for a subgroup over-predict or under-predict college performance compared to the set as a whole.
AIU the posts from @Babale, @puzzlegal, and @thorny_locust, they believe that using the SAT in college admissions is bad because lower SES would lower a student’s SAT score more than their potential college performance, thus depriving capable students of an opportunity (they can correct me if I have misunderstood).
If this is true, then differential prediction analysis should show that the SAT under-predicts performance of lower SES students, ie on average they get higher GPAs in college than their SAT scores would predict. I can’t find this data for parental SES, but have found it for parental education level, and it shows the opposite:
There appears to be a clear delineation of overprediction versus underprediction of FYGPA depending on parental education level. The FYGPAs of students whose parents have no high school diploma, a high school diploma, or an associate degree are overpredicted by all measures and combinations of measures, with mean residuals tending to be closer to zero for those with parents with an associate degree. The overprediction of FYGPA was greatest when HSGPA was used alone. However, the FYGPAs of students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree or graduate degree are underpredicted by all measures and combinations of measures, with mean residuals tending to be smaller (more accurate) for those with parents with a bachelor’s degree. See Figure A 4 in the Appendix for a visualization of this relationship.
From this report here:
These are not large differences according to the report, but AIUI they do contradict the story of ‘having well off parents aids performance on standardised tests more than with general academic ability’. So, is there anything wrong with my reasoning? And is there any contrary data on differential prediction of the SAT?
If you were really managing to survive that way, and some people do, you’d be taking in probably an order of magnitude more money than $1.90 a day.
thorny_locust is right that the only realistic way to survive on your own in the US with a cash income that low is to get most of your sustenance from non-money resources. Such as farming and processing your own food (and probably fiber animals too) on your own land.
For the record, I wasn’t trying to diminish poverty. I lived in poverty (well, poverty by first world standards) for the first 25 years or so of my life. I’d rather have money.
The point, however, is that the U.S. capitalist system has provided such bounty that the ‘poor’ have roughly the standard of living as the world average. The poverty line in America is higher than the median income in many countries.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore it - it means we should avoid trying to ‘fix’ it by breaking the system that created all the wealth in the first place.
That’s not the argument you made to him. If that’s the argument you wanted to get across to him, you didn’t make it at the time. The argument you made to him was this
Nothing about a digression or being irrelevant.
Your response was about how to or not to compare poverty. His statement was refuting someone who was expressing surprise that someone from a different country didn’t realize that there was a “shitload” of poor people in the US. In response to that, it’s fair to say that, looking at other countries, it’s not so obvious that the US has a shitload of poor people. Because it’s relative. So yes, it was relevant.
He wasn’t quoting something about the SATs and posting about other countries’ level of poverty.
If that’s the case, not only did you not remark on the digression, you continued the digression with your comment.
Sometimes, someone can be both irrelevant, and wrong, as sam is here.
And additional portions may only be staying above it with the aid of the labor, at home or for pay, of their children. Who will have less time to read than the children of those who are better off. Which was the context of that discussion.
Also, it does seem to me that 13.7% of some 330 million people can be fairly described as “a shitload”. I didn’t say “the largest shitload on the planet.”
Also what @puzzlegal said.
Can’t speak for the others; but what I meant was that I doubt the SAT’s measure actual ability to learn, which is not the same thing.
That’s an ambitious target. Measuring whether students will do well in college is all I would expect of it, and it seems to do a reasonable job of that.
If @Babale was right and rich kids were scoring 100-200 points higher than poor ones solely by having access to test prep, you’d expect that the poorer kids would get better grades in college than their SAT score predicts, and the rich ones worse. That is the data I wanted. But the closest measure I’ve found shows the opposite. This suggests to me that the problem is not with the test.
And @IvoryTowerDenizen’s second link is kind of disturbing:
The growing correlation between race and test scores over the past 25 years reflects the growing segregation of Latino and black students in California’s poorest, lowest-performing schools. Statistically, race has become as important as either family income or parents’ education in accounting for test-score differences among UC applicants. Using the SAT and ACT under the constraints of Proposition 209 means accepting adverse impacts on underrepresented minority applicants beyond what can be justified by the limited predictive value of the tests. If UC cannot legally consider race as a socioeconomic disadvantage in admissions, neither should it consider scores on nationally normed tests. Race-blind implies test-blind admissions. The paper concludes with a discussion of options for replacing or eliminating the SAT and ACT in UC admissions.
First, segregation and inequality are growing, and in California which AIUI is one of the more liberal states. Obviously that is pretty terrible. Secondly, their solution is not to fix this problem, but to eliminate the test that merely highlights it. If the problem is caused by bad schools rather than a bias in the SAT, it will surely affect those kids’ ability to do well in college, too. Is it really helping them to send students to a college where they are likely to struggle, and may be more likely to drop out with debts?
A system that has one out of seven people living in poverty is already broken.
Why? Success in college has a lot to do with being able to pass similar tests.
If the society defines “success” as “being good at doing x”, that’s going to reflect in all sorts of ways. If “x” doesn’t apply to much of the work that needs to be done, then some of those ways are going to be generally damaging, and others will be damaging of particular people.
And I’m not sure that anyone’s saying the difference in how one does on the tests has to do only with test prep. That’s a factor; but so are the other living conditions that allow one to get the vocabulary, mathematical training, and other information necessary to pass the tests. And having gotten that information and training before entering college also makes it easier to do well in college; as does being in the living conditions which make it easier to get them.
Is it really helping them to say okay, it’s too late, you’re doomed, don’t bother trying to go to college; even though employers are now insisting on college degrees before they’ll consider hiring in all sorts of fields?
And are the people who propose not using the tests in admissions also proposing that nothing be done to fix the problem in the schools for younger people, or to ameliorate it after admission to college?
You can help them by fixing the schools that gave them horrific educations. Or, you can fix them by offering free remedial education to get them up to speed.
What you shouldn’t do is just lower standards, or pretend that the stuff they didn’t learn is just ‘whiteness’ and doesn’t matter, or some other form of sweeping the core problem under the rug. That being that the K-12 education system is totally failing poor students, and especially poor minority students.
If you want to find real systemic racism, start with the teacher’s unions who refuse to fire bad teachers and use poor and broken schools as an excuse to demand higher teacher pay rather than real reform, and who virulently oppose school choice which a large majority of inner city parents want.
Stories like this should be a five-alarm fire in the school system:
Heads should be rolling over this. But because it’s happening in a poor district with no political clout, in a city where a single political party machine has been running things for decades, nothing happens. But because the teacher’s unions are incredibly powerful in the Democratic party, and Democrats run the city, the failure will be blamed on ‘not enough money’ (they get way above the average amount already), or on some vague ‘systemic racism’ they aren’t responsible for.
If we actually cared about poor minority children, we’d burn those schools to the ground, fire every teacher involved, and allow parents to send kids to the school of their choice. If schools had to fear losing their students if they screwed up, maybe they’d work a little harder to recruit better teachers and get rid of the bad ones.
That’s what happens in ‘left wing’ Canada. If a school starts to suck really bad, parents are free to send their kids elsewhere. We have closed down several inner-city schools in my city after enrollment dropped because parents voted with their feet and took their kids to better schools. The only thing you lose by putting your kid in another school district is free bus service.
The K-12 education system in the US is the root cause of disparate educational performance between poor and rich, white and minority, but Democrats are focused on finding ‘systemic racism’ everywhere but the system they control, and unsurprisingly they are pushing the idea that disparate outcomes in K-12 are due to anything except the actual education the disadvantaged are receiving.
What happens now is that inner city kids get lousy educations. Because they are mostly mimorities, this has the effect of fewer minorities getting into college. Rather than look at the root cause, we simply lower requirements for college admission. Then when those kids don’t do well in college we change graduation standards, engage in grade inflation, or create pablum courses they can get through.
Then when those kids graduate, employers figure out that they likely aren’t as well educated anyway, so,we create affirmative action programs to force their hiring and create the entire diversity and inclusion industry and a bullshit theory that blames it all on ‘whiteness’ rather than shitty schools and shitty trachers.
Then if the poorly educated get a job, they tend to under-perform which feeds into stereotypes about how minorities just aren’t smart enough or hard working enough.
Because ultimately, all the social justice in the world won’t hide the reality that some people are starting out with much worse educations than others, and the respnsibility for this falls squarely on the teachers and schools that taught them.
Unfortunately, it’s now really hard to get nominated as a Democrat without the support of the teacher’s unions. And these big cities are nothing but Democrats, so nothing serious gets done.
I’m sure someone said earlier that there are non- or less-selective colleges where students who don’t get into the most selective universities can go.
But isn’t the requirement for a degree the real problem here? Not only does it put the majority of young people in debt for an education that is not actually necessary for most jobs, but it inevitably disadvantages people who do worse at tests and academic learning for any reason, but who might have a chance if they could start at the bottom and work their way up, acquiring knowledge on the way.
I’m not surprised that academics working at a university are not suggesting shrinking the higher education sector, but isn’t that the only real solution?
And unless you are going to reform colleges to do away with tests, essays, and their focus on academics in general (which seems to be rather missing the point), it is wrongheaded to complain that the SAT is influenced by factors that also influence college success. That’s not a bug, that’s the test working as intended. You seem to be saying that the test is defective because it doesn’t somehow measure how students would perform in college if they had grown up in an alternate universe with every possible advantage. Even if that were possible, what use would it be?
@Babale said this:
But after rereading, I think his real claim is that the SAT doesn’t measure anything relevant to college success or inherent to the student, which is obviously not true.
I was going to say you’re putting too much blame on the schools, because in general I think their influence is overrated, but a school as bad as in the article you linked can easily cause kids to fail. For a start, they have to actually attend in order to get an education.
An educated population is of benefit I and of itself, ESPECIALLY in a representative democracy.
You are totally missing the point. The goal of a college shouldn’t be to only let in the people who will perform best at the college. The goal of the college should be to do some of that, but also to bring in some people who could actually really benefit from a college education in growing and developing their academic skills but had never been in the proper environment to do so. Even if at the end they’re not quite as extraordinary as the person who was already ahead of the curve would have been.
As someone from the first group, one of the most helpful things to me about college was getting out of my bubble and meeting some people from the second group.